


Fifty for Fifty

by jinlian



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 04:18:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlian/pseuds/jinlian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fifty-word challenge: fifty sentences for fifty prompts. Inuyasha/Kagome centric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifty for Fifty

  
**1\. Motion** **  
**He stretches, joints cracking, limbs stiffer and slower even as he rips through Mistress Centipede—he has been sleeping for fifty years, and she has freed him.  
  
 **2\. Cool**  
Souta keeps the hat that Inuyasha used to wear when he visited, in memory of the big brother who changed his sister’s life.  
  
 **3\. Young**  
“I’m just saying, it’s a little weird that you’re more than one hundred years older than I am—it’s a good thing that’s not going on a marriage licence.”  
  
 **4\. Last**  
The reason their fights last so long, Miroku remarks dryly to Sango, is that neither wants to be the one to run out of arguments first, and they both have to have the final word.   
  
 **5\. Wrong**  
She’s nothing like Kikyou, in the end: where Kikyou was calm, where Kikyou knew the presence she commanded, where Kikyou preferred to act alone, Kagome screams and stumbles and misses and she is always, always there.  
  
 **6\. Gentle**  
Inuyasha’s hands are calloused, bloodstained, and capable of breaking bones with little more than a touch; yet he never leaves a mark on her, his touches light as he cups her cheek, her neck, the small of her back.  
  
 **7\. One**  
During a pregnancy scare, Kagome swears that if a litter of puppies shoots out of her she will never forgive him, and Inuyasha knows better than to try to reason with her with the reminder that he and Sesshoumaru were only children; instead he calls her stupid and takes the day off, because to be honest, the idea of having a child—let alone many—scares him far more than it scares Kagome.   
  
 **8\. Thousand**  
Inuyasha will live a thousand years, but Kagome will not even live one hundred.   
  
 **9\. King**  
Sesshoumaru has the land and titles, but as he walks away from his brother’s human village, he knows he’s left Rin with the richer life.  
  
 **10\. Learn**  
Kagome’s not sure whether she wants to groan or cry at the paper that lies on her desk, so she settles for staring blankly, until red flashes at the corner of her vision and she turns towards the window.  
  
 **11\. Blur**  
The first few times she rides on his back, she’s nearly sick: the world becomes one colour, the wind whips her face, and all she has for security as they freefall are her knees clamped around his waist and fingers curled tightly into his shoulders, where she can hide her face in his back to focus on the rough thread of his haori and the tense-and-release of the warm body supporting her.  
  
 **12\. Wait**  
Twice a day, every day he walks to the well to see if this time, this time, it will let him through; twice a day, every day he returns to the village with dirt on his hands and under his nails.   
  
 **13\. Change**  
Inuyasha would have wished away his humanity to become a demon; Kikyou would have had him wish humanity were all he had; but Kagome whispers in his ear,  _“I like you best as a hanyou,”_  and she never asks for any different.  
  
 **14\. Command**  
She lifts the prayer beads from around his neck, and he is triumphant as he tackles her, quieting her indignant protests with his own mouth.   
  
 **15\. Hold**  
She is limp and cold in his arms, and despite his words to Shippou there is no holding back the hot, hot tears that track an unfamiliar path down his face.  
  
 **16\. Need**  
One would think Inuyasha would know, after so long, not to get caught with his hands inside Kagome’s backpack and her textbooks scattered in the grass; but his only defence, yelped and spat between mouthfuls of dirt, is that he is hungry and he  _really really needs it now._  
  
 **17\. Vision**  
It could be the cold making her delusional, or it could be real, but when she blinks away the snow melting on her too-hot skin and sees herself holding nothing but air, she realises it doesn’t matter.   
  
 **18\. Attention**  
Inuyasha’s bad mood always intensifies when he hears the name “Houjo”, and while he knows it’s irritating to hear Kagome talk about the boy at all, he can’t yet pinpoint why that is.  
  
 **19\. Soul**  
He holds Kikyou for the last time, gripping tighter and tighter as though he, only he, can keep her tethered to the earth; but her clay body crumbles, and from far away Kagome sees the souls of the dead that held her together taking their last flight to the heavens.  
  
 **20\. Picture**  
Kagome keeps a photo of her family under her pillow and studies it when she’s afraid she’s forgetting their faces, but she will never regret staying here, with a different family that she loves just as much.  
  
 **21\. Fool**  
Their enemies think that Kagome is his weakness; they all soon learn that Kagome is his strength.  
  
 **22\. Mad**  
“Kagome’s boyfriend is crazy,” Yuka says over a McDonald’s lunch with the air of one secure in her superior life decisions; Ayumi sighs, “But he’s so  _dreamy,”_  and the other two girls can’t quite argue with that.  
  
 **23\. Child**  
They never discuss whether they ever really wanted it or not, but sometimes Inuyasha watches when Kagome plays with Sango’s children, and he thinks he knows her answer.  
  
 **24\. Now**  
Kagome begins to lose track of whether it’s “past” or “present” or “future”; she no longer knows whether the events in her history textbook have already happened or are happening even as she reads.  
  
 **25\. Shadow**  
Even though he tries to fool himself into believing otherwise, Inuyasha knows that the light Kikyou casts is only false, the glow of the souls that cannot rest while they feed her earth-and-bones body; but Kagome’s is hot, Kagome’s is bright and red and angry, and she is very, very much alive.

 **26\. Goodbye  
** The morning after her burial Shippou finds a handful of dandelions, small and underwhelming next to the bouquets laid for the village priestess, but bunched and bright against the grey of the stele engraved with her name.

 **27\. Hide** **  
**Luckily they have enough warning that by the time Miroku finally finds them, they are at least partially clothed with most of the forest floor out of their hair, but flushed faces and heavy breaths betray them.

 **28\. Fortune  
** It is her wish that ends the endless struggles of the Jewel; but despite the fortune she brings, they are only fortune’s fools.

 **29\. Safe  
** He locks her away so she cannot come back; and even if she hates him, it doesn’t matter, because at least in her time he will know she is alive.

 **30** **. Ghost**  
He leaves, because their home still smells of her, still has her clothes neatly laid out for the next morning, still hangs her bow and quiver by the door so she can grab them in a hurry; it’s as though she’s only gone for a walk, and he can’t keep thinking she might come back.  
  
 **31\. Book**  
Kagome claims that she needs them for “school”, but it seems to Inuyasha that their only use is for hitting him over the head.  
  
 **32\. Eye**  
Kagome always knows when he’s been to see Kikyou, because he can’t look her straight-on for hours, and for a long time, it makes her angry; but eventually she comes to understand that there’s something in his heart for her that makes him feel that guilt. **  
  
 **33\. Never  
**** He doesn’t know what exactly it is that he feels for her; but he does know that things are a little worse when she’s not with him, and he doesn’t want to let her go.  
  
 **34\. Sing**  
The first time they kiss, really kiss, his nerves thrum like her bowstring, an arrow released for flight—a single note that hums through every bone and muscle, an instrument of wars.  
  
 **35\. Sudden**  
She doesn’t know how or exactly when it happened; but as she looks at the familiar Goshinboku tree, her eyes tracking the cracks and grooves still in place from when arrows pinned a hanyou to its trunk five hundred years ago, Kagome understands that somewhere along the line she fell in love with him. **  
  
 ** **36\. Stop  
****** She hangs in the blackness, and she does not move; and though the Jewel whispers horrors in her ears, she knows that Inuyasha is coming, and she will not wish without him.  
  
 **37\. Time**  
He can only watch as Kagome succumbs to the one enemy Inuyasha will never be able to defeat, each year growing a little greyer, a little weaker, and a little closer to a death he will evade for centuries more.  
  
 **38\. Wash**  
He remembers having just met her, accidentally seeing the white curve of her back as soap and water traced against her; he remembers he was punished for it, back then when the enchanted beads pulled him irreversibly to the rocks below, and years later when  _the children are right there, not now._  
  
 **39\. Torn**  
She watches him leave her every time he catches the dead woman’s scent; she watches him come back to her after she’s rubbed the red and wet from her eyes.  
  
 **40\. History**  
Kagome knows that she cannot change what Inuyasha loved and lost with Kikyou, but she can, instead, give him a future—something no one else ever could.  
  
 **41\. Power**  
He loses himself to the thrill running through his veins, the sheer strength of demon blood and the need to show it, the desire to  _kill, kill, kill_ —but she is always there to pull him back, a force that not even his bloodthirst-crazed mind can deny.  
  
 **42\. Brother**  
Kagome calls Sesshoumaru her brother-in-law because she likes the sound of it, and she knows there’s nothing either brother can do about it.  
  
 **43\. God**  
When the sun hides herself away, the heavens suffer for it, lost in the dark until the people sing and dance to bring her back; but no matter how many times Miroku makes the smirking suggestion, and no matter how bored he is without Kagome, Inuyasha definitely isn’t dancing.  
  
 **44\. Wall**  
Some days, Inuyasha waits to jump back out of the well, picturing instead of clouds the wooden beams of the shrine and imagining he’s with her again; then he sinks his toes into the packed mud and bones and swears that whatever is keeping them apart, he will break through it.  
  
 **45\. Naked**  
The new moon used to be a time that he dreaded, when his claws shrank, his senses dulled, and his blade stayed dull and rusted; but now he doesn’t mind it, not as much, for she stays a constant warmth against his side.  
  
 **46\. Drive**  
The blade itself used to be the reminder that he had to protect her to wield it; now he wields Tessaiga to protect her. **  
  
 ** **47\. Harm  
****** The moment a demon turns on Kagome is the moment death welcomes it home. **  
  
 ** **48\. Precious  
****** She gave up the chance for the wish of her dreams so she could end the suffering of others, even if it meant leaving her friends forever; how could he let a person like that ever leave him again?  
  
 **49\. Hunger**  
The only pitfall, Inuyasha realises about a week later, is that he will never eat ramen noodles again.  
  
 **50\. Believe**  
Maybe, Inuyasha thinks as he pulls her from the well, that all the time before he’d just been looking at all the wrong moments.


End file.
